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Mandriva Linux forked into Mageia community distribution

One of several proposed logos for Mageia
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mageia
Concerns over the future of the Mandriva Linux distribution have led to a group of former Mandriva employees and contributors creating a fork of Mandriva called Mageia. Jerome Quelin announced the fork in an posting on the Mandriva Cooker mailing list. The announcement was co-signed by over thirty former Mandriva employees, developers and community members who are seeking to ensure the survival of Mandriva Linux. The developers say the fork will be a community project and the group will be creating a not-for-profit organisation with, for the first year, an interim board of community members until elections can be held.

According to the announcement, most of the Mandriva employees who worked on the distribution were laid off when a Mandriva services subsidiary, Edge-IT, was liquidated in the wake of the company finding new investors. "We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA any more and we don't think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project" says the Mageia.org web page.

Over fifty members of the Mandriva development community, including a number of former Mandriva employees are now listed on the web site as contributors to the Mageia project. Currently, the project is looking for hardware for code hosting and build servers, locations to host the servers and more developers and contributors to support the release of Mageia. It is currently being coordinated through mailing lists and on IRC channels. The project says that it's aim is to provide a straightforward to use, free and open source Linux distribution, with integrated system configuration tools and improved system, desktop and application integration.